No, You Cannot Have A Moment of My Time
by phantomviola
Summary: A telemarketer makes the unfortunate desision to call Wilson at the wrong time. Set in Wilson's Heart, T for mild language. Oneshot musings.


**Yay! My first House fic! This story was a shower epiphany, and I knew if I didn't finish it soon, I never would, so please read and review! Okay, so this is during Wilson's heart, just before House wakes up from the coma.**

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"Any change?" Wilson asked Cuddy, leaning into House's room, where the coma made him look almost… peaceful, in an odd way.

"Wha…" Lisa Cuddy said, jerking awake, and yawning. "Nope. No change."

Wilson leaned out, and started pacing back and forth, up the hallway. No one seemed to think this was odd, the ones who knew him as head of oncology just assumed he had to give a patient bad news, and the ones who didn't thought he was a family member, concerned about a… a brother, maybe. The fathers usually stayed in one place, staring through the blinds at their child, or in a waiting room, their heads resting in their hands, as if the energy they hadn't used moving around could be transferred to their sick, maybe dying, child.

Suddenly, his cell phone rang, a warm, cheery tone, contrasting with the sound of heart rate monitors beeping.

"Uh, Wilson here, how can I help you?" he said, momentarily distracted by a flash of movement in House's room… but no, it was Cuddy, repositioning herself in the chair by House's bed.

"Hello," said a chipper voice, "I'm Haley Croft from Sanugin Research Center, can I have a moment of your time?"

Wilson sighed. "Let me see… my girlfriend just died, my best friend's in a coma, my ass is getting sued, because I didn't give a guy a death sentence—oh no, I gave him a _life sentence,_ told him he _wasn't _dying, offered him six grand, which apparently isn't enough to compensate for having to endure the _unbearable_ agony of him _not dying_; but none of that really matters, because I'm a doctor, and patients come first. Always.

"I have twenty-five patients, twenty-four of whom are going to die, including a newly-wed twenty-six year old with stage three lung cancer, a six year old with chronic myelogenous leukemia whose parents won't authorize treatment because a _fraction _of the people who get treatment die quicker than those who get the treatment that could _save their daughter's life_, a thirty-nine year old woman who has been trying to get pregnant since she got married at twenty-two, but will likely have to terminate the pregnancy to undergo treatment, and a man who works at a gas station, whose wife just lost her job because she's busy caring for their five children, which used to be the oldest kid's job, but they decided to give him a chance at getting out of their hell-hole of a life, so he's going to high school, and then, probably community college--if anything—and then spend the rest of his life as a lowly, unappreciated clerk while his mother and brothers and sisters suffer on welfare, so he can have a _chance at life._

"You may have noticed that only twenty-four of my patients are dying, that's because the last patient thinks she has breast cancer because she wears an underwire bra, but I have to suck up to her and be 'emotionally supportive' because her uncle is a big-shot on the board, and basically has every doctor in this place at his beck and call because anyone he _thinks _made a mistake or didn't treat with 'good emotional etiquette' is getting fired so my boss doesn't think they're a liability that will get us sued.

"Right now, however, we can do whatever we want, because our boss is camped out in my best friend's room—remember him? The one in the coma?—treating him better than he's ever treated _any _of his patients, except, of course the ones he wants to sleep with.

"On one hand, he's the one who _basically _killed my girlfriend, by being too drunk and needing a ride from the bar, the bartender having taken away the keys to his motorcycle, which led to them getting on the bus, which led to the accident, which led to kidney failure, which led to amantadine poisoning, which led to heart failure, which, if you haven't guessed yet, led to her dying.

"On the other hand, already, he almost died on the bus, went into cardiac arrest taking drugs that were supposed to help him remember what was wrong with her, suffered a crack in his skull, hypnosis, hallucinations, being locked into his house with a security guard and a crazy nurse and, _oh yeah, _went into a coma for her.

"But, then again, on the first hand, this was all to just feed his curiosity, which is basically the only _emotion _he feels, besides pain, so I don't know if he's just doing this for me, or Amber, or himself, to feed on his super-ego, to solve a mystery because it's a mystery, not because there are people or feelings—not even because there's a _life _involved. No. It's for himself. He once practically tortured a patient who can't feel pain because he feels too much. Our boss committed perjury for him because we _thought _he was going to rehab, but it turns out the guy who runs rehab was sneaking him pills all along, so basically the only thing that accomplished was making our boss a felon. And he _hated _Amber. Do you know what his pet name for her was? _Cut-throat bitch."_

Wilson sighed, and started again.

"I'm really tired, and I suppose I should go home and go to bed, but, surprise, surprise, I won't be able to sleep, because that bed is the one me and Amber fought over buying last week. I can't go on the _couch_, because right below there is the place we slept the night we got that horrible, Goddamn water bed. Just _coming in_ our apartment will hurt, because I'll see the mirror where she used to do her hair, every morning… she would try to put her hair up like the celebrities at the Oscars, then she would take it down, because, well, it looked hideous. It was a ritual, I think, because anyone who can go that long without realizing her hair looks better down must have short-term memory loss. And here's the kicker: even in the _bathroom_ I'll be thinking about her, her and the diet pills she didn't tell me about.

"So I should say goodbye to any hope of a decent sleep for the next, oh, two weeks or so, and prepare for the endless caffeine and two minute-naps stolen in the nurse's lounge that will keep me alive and barely functioning."

Wilson paused.

"What I mean is no… No, you cannot have a minute of my time."

_-Click-_


End file.
